Gulfstream

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/29/arts/design/29scis.html Japanese company decides whether Christie’s or Sotheby’s should auction its artwork via Rock, Scissors, Paper. 20:33

http://www.fametracker.com/blue_moons/misc_shyamalan.shtml What might happen in M. Night Shyamalan’s new film. “The sea nymph is a sexually insatiable fish but is vulnerable to water: 10 to 1.” 08:03

http://www.scjag.com/mp3/sc/hopetheressomeone.mp3 Antony and the Johnsons: Hope there’s someone. There’s quite a few good free MP3s on Secretly Canadian’s website: Scout Niblet’s Uptown Top Ranking and Songs: Ohia’s Farewell Transmission being but two. 23:23

http://www.lrb.co.uk/classified/index.php#PESONALS 23:08

http://shamash.org/lists/scj-faq/HTML/faq/07-16.html “Would it be disrespectful to call an Orthodox Jew on the telephone at at time when it is not Shabbat for the Jew, but was still Shabbat for me?” (Yes.) Reading this reminded me of another religious-observance question I’ve been wondering about: what do you do if you’re a Muslim who happens to be in Antarctica during Ramadan? Apparently, what you do is fast between the hours of sunrise and sunset in a neighbouring country. 22:31

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,1564,1560921,00.html Armin Meiwes to be tried again? Huh? How is this not double jeopardy? 23:43

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1462820,00.html The best restaurants in the world. 09:18

http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/health/features/11700/index1.html Target’s beautifully designed new pill bottle. (Flaws of existing designs on the previous page.) 06:18

http://roughly.beasts.org/ Estimation quiz. The instructions don’t really explain it properly, but the “error” you specify works a little bit like a standard deviation—it’s better if the correct answer is within the limits you specify, but you can still get some points if it’s not. (Analysis of the results (read afterwards!): 1, 2; from the second you can work out your overall rank.) 06:50

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60578-2005Apr17.html When do we get another Einstein? Would Einstein even get published today? 05:02

http://www.brandchannel.com/start1.asp?fa_id=259 On Dove’s “real beauty” campaign. I don’t particularly mind these sorts of campaigns, as long as they don’t attempt to deny the existence of (or function of) ugly. We’re not all equally beautiful, and nor should we be. 04:40

http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/sfo/65266930.html 23:42

http://www.craigslist.org/about/space.html 21:06

http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/engineers.html The 11 white males who did OS X 10.4. (Or as trading cards.) 06:27

http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/scigen/#examples Conference accepts computer-generated computer science paper. (Looks like Alan Sokol, at least, was suitably cautious in not attempting to draw any strong conclusions from the fact that Social Text accepted his nonsense paper “Transgressing the Boundaries”: “From the mere fact of publication of my parody I think that not much can be deduced.”)

(I’m giving Sokol the benefit of doubt here; in an earlier piece he seemed much more gleeful: “… to test the prevailing intellectual standards, I decided to try a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment: Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies -- whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross -- publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions? The answer, unfortunately, is yes.”) 20:43

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,
5744,12844414^7582,00.html Rupert Murdoch: “The challenges of the online world.” “[Young people] want their news on demand, when it works for them. They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it. They want to question, to probe, to offer a different angle. Think about how blogs and message boards revealed that Kryptonite bicycle locks were vulnerable to a Bic pen. Or the Swiftboat incident. Or the swift departure of Dan Rather from CBS.” 17:55

http://www.hertzmann.com/articles/2005/fables/ How to cut different things. 09:08

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1559107,00.html Some guy found the (integer) 13th root of a 200 digit number in just under 10 minutes! 09:03

http://freshjive.com/ Freshjive parodies Stussy logo; Stussy sues. (Wonder if Carrie McLaren et al. get animated about this?) 08:44

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050418fa_
fact On Tony Wheeler, the founder of Lonely Planet. 00:43

http://slate.com/id/2116449/ “Today, more than 40 percent of the black girls born in California in a given year receive a name that not one of the roughly 100,000 baby white girls received that year.” (Piece concludes that “black names” are correlated with poorer outcomes, but not the cause.) 23:13

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n06/cast01_.html I don’t have any particularly strong feelings for or against Susan Sontag, but this strikes me as a particularly vulgar reminiscence. (Especially the way in which Sontag is diminished through selective quoting.) 08:29

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/10/fashion/10date.html “Almost all men agree that beer and hard alcohol are acceptable man date beverages, but wine is risky. And sharing a bottle is out of the question.” 04:53

http://slate.com/id/2116443/ Guess who? “What strikes one now is the similarity between the predicament of the Vatican and the predicament of the Kremlin about 45 years ago. Between the death of Stalin and the end of Khrushchev, the crucial question was: How much heresy and revisionism and autonomy can be permitted, without endangering the entire ideology of the regime?” Christopher Hitchens, natch. 02:24

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050411fa_
fact Photographing medieval tapestries. 09:29